


I'm Getting Good At It: "Tithonus" and the Season Six Premise

by PlaidAdder



Series: X-Files Meta [14]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Gen, Meta, Nonfiction, season six, tithonus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-18
Updated: 2014-07-18
Packaged: 2018-02-09 10:36:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1979661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which I talk about how, although the actual case in "Tithonus" is not that gripping, the episode is better because it uses the "taking Mulder and SCully off the X-Files" premise of Season 6 to do some really interesting character work with Mulder and Scully.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'm Getting Good At It: "Tithonus" and the Season Six Premise

 

In my last post I lumped “Tithonus” in amongst the lackluster episodes of Season 6, calling it a not very good ripoff of “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose.” But I’ve rewatched it now…and I was wrong!

It’s still nowhere near as good as Clyde Bruckman; but really, what X-Files episode is. The X-File part of it is also kind of boring. But what makes this episode better than I remembered is the fact that it finally does something interesting with the Season 6 premise.

So, at the end of Season 5, Mulder’s office is torched and all his X Files are reduced to charcoal. At the beginning of Season 6, Jeffrey Spender and Diana Fowley take over the X-Files project and Mulder and Scully are reassigned. This happened before during Season 2, when it was an attempt to cope with the fact that Anderson was going to be out of commission for a while. This time around it’s different, though, because Mulder and Scully no longer have a semi-sympathetic boss. They now report to Assistant Director Kirsch, who seems to think it’s his duty to the FBI to humiliate both of them by forcing them to do low-level shitwork. They don’t even have their own office; they’ve been moved into a big room full of computer monitors in which they spend a lot of time doing routine background checks.  

This of course makes it difficult to frame the individual episodes. Either the X-File presents itself to them (as it does in “Drive”), Mulder goes out and finds it on his own time (“How the Ghosts Stole Christmas,” “Triangle,” “Terms of Endearment”) or someone else outside the FBI, knowing their reputation, contacts them about it (“Dreamland”). After that, though, apart from some incidental comedy about the crap they’re assigned to do, the situation hasn’t mattered too much to the episode itself.

"Tithonus" finally starts to get into what it means for Mulder and Scully that the original basis for their relationship is gone. It also shows, in subtle but satisfying ways, how much each of them has helped the other grow. At the beginning of the episode, Scully is called into Kirsch’s office. Turns out that one Agent Ritter, a young guy based in New York and looking to make a reputation for himself, is running down a case involving a photographer who has been taking photos of crime scenes long before anyone who wasn’t the killer should have known about the murders. He wants Scully’s help. Scully goes out to investigate. Ritter’s limitations begin manifesting almost immediately; but it’s OK because Mulder is working the problem (without permission, of course) back in DC. Between the two of them they work it out that Fellig, their suspect, seems to have been kicking around since the mid-nineteenth century. Scully confronts Fellig and he tells her that he has a sense for when someone is going to die soon, and that he chases these people in order to get a picture of the actual moment of death, because he’s trying to photograph Death. He believes he’s come close. He wants to do this because he thinks that if he can meet Death he can convince Death to let him die. See, Death came for him once long ago, but by refusing to look at him Fellig forced him to take someone else instead, and now he can’t die. Scully is still talking to him when Mulder discovers that in fact Fellig did kill a couple people back in the day; he calls Ritter (Fellig has hidden Scully’s phone) and asks him to go find Scully. Meanwhile Fellig has discovered that Scully is marked for death, and is getting ready to take the picture. Scully is of course highly alarmed by this. Ritter bursts in and takes a shot at Fellig—not pausing to notice that Scully is standing directly behind him, so that the bullet goes through him and into her. She is bleeding and expiring on the floor when Fellig takes her hand and tells her to close her eyes. Death takes him instead. Scully recovers in the hospital. The end.

What I like about all this is the way Mulder and Scully cope with the fact that Kirsch appears to be trying to split them up. Kirsch flat-out tells Scully that he thinks she can still have a career at the FBI but Mulder is “a lost cause,” and this assignment is obviously about trying to tempt her into cutting him loose so that she can get back on track. Mulder is of course not happy; but he doesn’t try to sabotage her or to make her feel bad about leaving him behind. He does involve himself in the case without asking her first—hacking into A.D. Kirsch’s email in order to do so—but he also seems to genuinely want her to succeed. After Scully admits that yes, in fact, it does look as if this case is a genuine X-File, Mulder offers to do a background check on the suspect for her. She demurs; he insists. “This is what I do now,” he says. “I’m getting good at it.” I found it an unexpectedly touching moment. He can see a long, unhappy future of gruntwork and humiliation ahead of him; but he’s still excited about contributing whatever he can, even if she’s the only one who gets to do the fun stuff. Later, when he calls in to drop the bomb about Fellig’s longevity, he’s so proud of how hard he worked to find all this old stuff. Of course he’d rather be out there with her; but if he has to be Background Check Boy, he can live with that, as long as he can still in some way be part of her team.

Scully’s response is even more interesting. We don’t really know, at first, exactly how she feels about the idea of leaving Mulder in the dust. She’s very impassive during the scene in Kirsch’s office and she doesn’t immediately reassure Mulder when he says “they’re splitting us up.” Maybe she’s started to think about her future and is willing to give this a try. But what happens, as she works with Ritter, is that she realizes that she’s been changed so much by being outside the box that she really can’t get back into it—and more to the point, the box is bad. Ritter’s goal is not, as Scully says, “to find the truth” about what’s happening; his goal is to nail Fellig for a bunch of unsolved murders, and he is not interested in anything that would complicate that. The more evidence they find that something else is going on, the harder Ritter works to neutralize it, until he finally convinces an ex-con to incriminate Fellig using fabricated testimony. Ritter also doesn’t like it that Scully makes her own decisions about how to pursue the case. When she confronts him about the mistakes she believes he’s making—just as she always did with Mulder—he freaks out, tries to intimidate her, threatens to ruin her career if she “mucks up” his case, and calls her “Dana.” To which she replies, “Scully,” in a withering tone that really should have made him curl up and die right there.

So many things this throws into relief about the journey both these characters have been on. First of all, watching Ritter do this thing makes you appreciate the respect that Mulder has always had for Scully. Yes, it seems weird to us that after all this time they still call each other Mulder and Scully; but as Ritter demonstrates, at least on Mulder’s end, using her last name is a way of respecting her status as his colleague rather than, for instance, his secretary. It’s true that Mulder doesn’t always respect her agency or her wishes in terms of his actions; but one thing he doesn’t do (except in some of the Season 5 mythology episodes) is try to make her feel incompetent, stupid, or inferior to him. As we saw back in “The Field Where I Died,” and as we see in a more satirical way in “Bad Blood,” Mulder sees Scully as someone who already has authority, and he really wants her approval. This is in a way destructive to Scully—his overwhelming need for her to validate his worldview by believing in it has made it hard for her to maintain her autonomy—but at least it’s different from the garden-variety sexism with which Ritter treats a woman who is older, smarter, and more experienced than he is. It points out how unusual Mulder is, for his time and his milieu, in being willing and indeed eager to work with a woman who is not afraid to challenge him. The show itself, as I’ve been saying, does various things to assure the dominance of Mulder and his worldview; but Mulder as a character is (on his good days) better than that.

Second, the way Scully approaches the case shows you something about her that we sometimes forget because of her “skeptic” label: she is willing to go where the evidence takes her, even if it’s outside her comfort zone. This is what allowed her to become Mulder’s partner instead of just his babysitter (as the FBI originally intended). Unlike Ritter, who doesn’t want to hear it if it doesn’t confirm his preconceived solution, Scully changes her interpretation of a situation based on what she learns about it. Her “scientific” orientation, in other words, is not just a belief system; it’s a methodology. That means that it’s not so much about being a “skeptic” or a “believer,” but about examining evidence and drawing logical conclusions from it. And in that sense, she and Mulder are actually not that different. The main difference between her and Mulder, really, is not that he believes things and she’s skeptical of them, but that they disagree on what constitutes evidence. Mulder is far more willing to accept personal testimony at face value. Scully wants material evidence—you know, the kind created by the operation of the laws of physics. But for both of them, what matters is to find the truth to which the evidence is leading them.

So two important things happen to Scully during this episode, from that point of view. One: she is reminded that she’s part of a vast government bureaucracy which is full—FULL—of careerist self-serving jackasses like Ritter to whom an idealistic commitment to truth and justice, or even disinterested scientific curiosity, matter not a whit. Two, she realizes that she has now started to routinely consider what used to be “extreme possibilities.” She doesn’t have to have Mulder there poking her to realize that there’s something very strange about Fellig. When Fellig shows her how the premonition-of-death thing works, she is willing to roll with it as the most likely explanation for what’s happening. She even—reluctantly—is willing to accept the possibility of Fellig’s immortality for the sake of argument; and when he starts turning the camera on her, you can see that both sides of her are freaked out: Skeptical Scully thinks he’s going to kill her himself, but Extreme Possibilities Scully is afraid that neutralizing Fellig won’t be enough to save her.

But what comes through most in her interactions with Fellig is that being in Mulder’s world, while it has changed her, hasn’t turned her into just another version of him. In her final interaction with Fellig, what matters most to her is not proving or disproving his immortality story but challenging him about his disengagement from life and from other human beings—the lack of compassion for the dying that makes it possible for him to spend his time the way he does. Though Fellig seems unimpressed by her arguments, Mulder suggests at the end that her calling Fellig on his callous detachment may have been what saved her life. She is now kicking herself for ever having believed his story. “People don’t live forever,” she says. “No,” Mulder says, “I have no doubt that he would have. I think death doesn’t find you until you start looking for its opposite.” In other words, it was Scully who made him realize that life can matter and that people do matter, and this was what made it possible for him to take her place.

Also, Scully’s immortal now. So that’s awesome.

So this episode, despite the paucity of the actual case, moves up in my standings because it offers something which is actually rare: a Scully-on-her-own story which develops and deepens her character. (“Never Again,” as part of the cancer arc, maybe does that; but “Chinga” certainly doesn’t, and “Three of a Kind” certainly won’t.) And, yeah, OK, she gets shot at the end, but apparently Chris Carter’s approach to Season Six was “LET’S KILL EVERYBODY!” Seriously…both Mulder and Scully get ‘shot’ in “How the Ghosts Stole Christmas.” Skinner dies for a few seconds in “S. R. 819.” Mulder’s going to die at least once in “Monday.” Who knows, maybe this is where Moffat got his thing for killing people and bringing them back.


End file.
